SOURCE: “John Steinbeck: Journeyman Artist,” in American Fiction, 1920-1940, The Macmillan Company, 1948, pp. 309-26.

In the following excerpt from an essay originally published in 1941, Beach compares “The Chrysanthemums” to the work of Anton Chekhov, calling the story's protagonist Elisa Allen “one of the most delicious characters ever transferred from life to the pages of a book.”

There are many of Steinbeck's short stories that remind one of the Russian writer. [Chekhov]. There is the opening story of the volume entitled The Long Valley (1938). It is called “Chrysanthemums.” It gives us the picture of a wholesome and attractive woman of thirty-five, wife of a rancher in that enchanting Salinas Valley where Steinbeck lived as a boy. This woman has what are called planter's hands, so that whatever she touches grows and flourishes. She is shown on a soft winter morning working in her garden, cutting down the old year's...